Get started with Search Console

What is your role?

If you have a website on an automated web hosting platform like Blogger, Wix, or Squarespace, or run a small business and don't have much time to put into your website, you might not need to use Search Console at all.

However, it's still worth reading a little bit about managing your presence in search engines by reading the following guides. A little knowledge can go a long way toward helping people find your site.

Measuring your performance on Google - Is your site on Google? How many people found your site on Google? What is your ranking in search results? What were people searching for when they found your site? Learn how to answer these questions.

Beginning user (willing to learn)

If you're interested in improving your site's appearance on Google Search, and you're willing to put in a little time learning about search engine optimization (SEO) and Search Console, here is your getting started guide. You don't need to understand HTML or coding, but you do need to spend some time thinking about how your site is organized and written, and be willing to make some changes to your site. The good news is that a little effort can go a long way in improving your search results.

Add and verify your ownership of your site. You'll need to prove that you are the owner of your website, because Search Console shows information about your site that only site owners should know, and allows you to make changes that can affect how your site appears on Google.

Read our SEO starter guide. This is an introduction to best practices for your website to ensure that Google is able to find, understand, and present your site properly in search results. It contains a lot of information, but you can take your time working through it.

Decide whether you want to hire an SEO expert. Many small website owners do all their own search engine optimization; in fact, if you read our documentation carefully, you can become an SEO expert yourself! But some small sites (and nearly all large sites) hire a professional SEO expert to help improve their presence on Google. Read this guide if you're thinking about hiring a professional SEO.

If, after learning the basics, you decide that you want to learn more advanced topics in SEO or Search Console, you can follow the SEO track below.

SEO (advanced user)

If you really want to spend some time digging into the reports and redesigning your site, you can really analyze and customize your site's performance on Google Search. This track assumes that you are familiar with basic SEO practices and terms.

Web developer

If you build or manage the website, implement structured data, or generally do most of your work in a code editor, you'll use Search Console for monitoring, testing, and debugging your site code. Here are our recommendations:

Learn how search works. Understanding the basics of crawling, indexing, and serving is important in order to help you debug Search-related issues on your site.

To inspect a single page, either drill down into a single URL from the appropriate report and click Inspect, or use the URL Inspection tool to inspect a specific URL. The URL Inspection tool provides information about all types of issues, including indexing, AMP, mobile usability, HTML, and scripting issues.

Read the developer documentation for Search to learn about API access to Search Console's tools and reports, structured data guides, AMP in search, mobile best practices, and more.